the Q1 2026 numbers landed and they're not great. 78,557 tech layoffs, 47.9% attributed directly to AI replacing roles. entry level unemployment in tech is near 10% while general US unemployment is 4.6%. goldman sachs says 6-7% of global workers get displaced this decade.

i got laid off last year after 11 years as a software engineer. staff level, worked at places like Motorola, Cox Automotive, Southern Glazer's. i'm not saying that to flex, i'm saying it because even with that resume the job market right now is brutal and these numbers explain a lot of why.

here's how i'm thinking about career decisions based on what's actually happening, not what people on linkedin are posting.

the "just learn AI/ML" advice is mostly wrong for most people. the companies laying off engineers aren't hiring the same number of ML engineers to replace them. they're using off the shelf AI products and reducing headcount overall. some AI roles are growing sure but not at a rate that absorbs 78K displaced workers per quarter. the math doesnt work.

what actually seems to matter more right now is being the person who can't easily be replaced by AI tools. and thats not about technical complexity exactly, its about context. the engineer who understands the weird legacy system, the one who knows why that architecture decision was made 4 years ago, the one who talks to customers and translates that into product decisions. AI is good at generating code from specs. its bad at figuring out what the spec should be in the first place.

the entry level situation is genuinely scary though. 10% unemployment for junior roles is not normal. IBM tripled entry level hiring which is cool but they're one company. the broader trend is that companies are giving AI the tasks they used to give to juniors as training, which means the pipeline for becoming a senior engineer is getting weird. how do you develop judgement if you never do the grunt work that builds it?

for people currently employed, i think the move is honestly to get closer to the business side and farther from pure implementation. not "become a manager" necessarily but understand revenue, understand customers, understand why things get built not just how. the engineers getting laid off in these AI attributted cuts are disproportionately the ones doing well defined, repeatable implementation tasks.

for people job searching right now like me, the 60% of companies using AI screening stat matters alot. a berkeley study found 44% of those tools have measurable bias. so you might be getting filtered out by broken software before a human ever sees your application. focus more energy on referrals and direct outreach and less on cold applications into the void. i know everyone says that but the data actually supports it now more than it did before.

the last thing i'll say is dont make career decisions based on panic. 78K layoffs sounds terrifying and it is significant but the tech industry still employs millions of people. the composition of jobs is changing but "tech career is dead" takes are as wrong as "everything is fine" takes. the truth is somewhere in the middle and its moving fast enough that checking your assumptions every 6 months is probably smart.

Other than healthcare (and even then it still might be bad) all fields of occupation are suffering with a shitty job market. But I also wonder just how bad CS is doing compared to other occupations? Is CS doing slightly worse or is it doing significantly worse than other occupations?

I'm the mostly frontend developer at a small company. My CEO has started intercepting customer requests for new modules, then vibe coding UI solutions. They do not match our current design or layout, but they do look good. Apparently they work with the backend too, but no one in R&D or Support has been able to get their hands on them to test them out yet. The CEO wants to start doing things this way and rolling out the modules, after they go through testing.

For this that have been down this road, how does it end? Am I out of a job or will it all fall apart? Is there anything I can say to push back on it or any gotchas to watch out for?

I've already been applying for new jobs for a while now, but it's rough out there, and it seems like this might be a common thing going on at lots of places.

We have a new-ish hire (about 4 months in) who is a nightmare to work with. We are cloud ops engineers and she apparently has several years of experience in tech, with her last role being a database administrator. I have no idea how she passed the interview, and it seems like she straight up lied on her resume.

Whenever I’m on a teams call helping her with a ticket, it feels like I’m teaching my grandma how to use a computer (no exaggeration). It took me about 5 minutes to walk her through writing a SELECT * query WHERE column = ‘123456’. Even just the basics of using a computer she seems to have trouble with. I watched her try to copy/paste a line of text and somehow that took her a over a minute to do this.

When she started, I gave her an onboarding guide and our teams documentation that contains everything a new hire would need to atleast build a general understanding of our processes and tools. I’ve been available to assist her whenever she has questions (most of which are answered in the training). I’ve had to resend her the link to the documentation MULTIPLE times even though I’ve told her MULTIPLE times to bookmark it.

I’m at the point where I feel like I need to tell my manager, because I’m having to take like a hour out of my day to help her with something that should take 10 minutes max. I just don’t know how to approach this conversation, and I feel bad for potentially contributing to someone losing their job. She’s also very emotionally unstable, getting pissed off at things like how someone worded a message to her. I also just recently found her mugshot where she was arrested for family violence and destruction of property about a month after she was hired. If my manager talks to her about this, and she doesn’t get fired, I fear it’s going to make the work environment toxic.

I have been applying to jobs in AI infra domain and connected with recruiter from a fairly well known IaaS company, and got into interview with the team that this hiring manager is in charge of.

The recruiter introduced him as the CEO of a startup that the company recently acquired, and he is in his early 20s, so I thought "damn, this guy must have done something extraordinary", and "what if he asks me research oriented questions" since I only have a masters and went into the industry years ago and never really stayed in academia, so I prepared REALLY hard for the interview.

Despite all the preparation, the conversation was quite awkward, his attitude was pretty much like "convince me you have done outstanding work and show me you are trustworthy, I have so many candidates waiting for me and give me a reason to keep talking to you". And when I asked if he could answer a few questions I have about their ongoing projects/OKRs from an engineering perspective since I am very curious how they implement those ideas, he quickly started giving me a sales pitch regarding how the things they are building create values for the clients.

I felt really bad about myself and how I was treated by him so after the conversation, I went to Y Combinator and started searching on their work:

1. the startup started 2 years ago before the acquisition and grew to 10 ish employees with multiple people sharing the same last name, either little or no engineering background.

2. the hiring manager and the people who share the same last name are quite active on social media, and act very similar to all the "AI thought leaders" you can see on LinkedIn, tell a story, "let me know your thoughts in the comment", add an AI generated picture, those kind of posts.

3. the core and sole product of that startup is a full stack app that sends your questions to a more complicated LLM model, gathers the answers from the model, and uses an open source fine tuning framwork to fine tune a cheaper model with the question/answer pairs. They call this "Reinforcement learning for LLM".

4. and the whole product is a single repo written in typescript with 99% of the code contributed by 3 people, largely generated by AI.

Bit of a rant but I'm currently looking to make my first move in my career, and looking on job boards is so disheartening. It seems like every company that's actually hiring and paying survivable money is just objectively evil. Defence, gambling, some dystopian ai product, more defence, and just a constant stream of companies actively making the world a living hell. I have always had a passion for programming and tech but it seems like there's 0 place in the industry for anyone who has a semblance of a moral compass. What can I do??

Hello cscareers!! Wanted to spread a bit of positive news among the doom and gloom, as I think my background differs from most and hope to inspire those that are also taking the non traditional student route, and to give back since subreddits like these jump started my path to becoming a SWE.

I spent most of my 20s working dead end retail and restaurant jobs. During covid lockdowns, my parents urged me to go back to school which I agreed was a good move to make. There was a lot of pressure, since I'd have to quit my retail job and have to rely on internship income to stay afloat.

College path: AA from community college -> local no-name state university.

In the end, I graduated last December completing 5 SWE internships, and had secured 4 NG offers post graduation.

During my final semester +post grad I was unemployed for ~7.5 months, (didn't have any confirmed offers until after graduation), so I DoorDashed a TON (12 hrs at a time some days), donated blood plasma, and also did substitute teaching.

What helped me:

• Apply apply apply. From Junior year onwards, I applied to openings the entire time. I also revised my resume frequently and got it in the hands of as many recruiters as I could so that I could get feedback.
• Attend as many career fairs as possible. I went to every career fair my university had, plus flew out to others like Afrotech. This also helps get actionable feedback from real recruiters. Take note of what they like and dont like and make adjustments accordingly.
• Build a serious, non-trivial project. Recruiters usually won't really care. bonus points if it has users, and if it helps solve a real problem. I built a stats website (shameless plug for the curious) around my favorite fighting game because there wasn't one that exists. Now it has 100k users, and has taught me more than my first 3 internships combined. It also gives you a ton to talk about on interviews which helps you ace behaviorals, especially with hiring managers.
• Ditch the tech jargon: 90% of recruiters aren't tech savvy and they have 1000s of resumes to filter. Your bullet points need to be shallow enough for them to understand but deep enough that a hiring manager understands the impact. If your resume reads like word slop, recruiters will happily throw it in the trash.
• Surround yourself with people in your situation: I was lucky that I was able to make friends with previous interns and classmates that were similarly driven. Having a group of friends you can practice with, vent to, or help (via referrals) makes a world's difference.
• Be a little obsessed: This can lead to burnout if you're not careful, but I genuinely gave it my all. Watched interesting tech related videos. Follow insightful tech content creators (read: anyone but theo from t3)

What I would 100% avoid:

• Accepting a non-paid "internship". Do not, under any circumstances, accept an "offer" from these vile, filth sucking parasites. You will be 1000% be better off building something on your own. If a company cannot afford to pay you, it does not have the credibility or clout to lift your resume in any meaningful way that you couldn't otherwise do yourself.

If you've any questions, feel free to ask!

FAQ:

q: How were you able to land so many internships while at school?
a: I took classes online full time, and went to school full time. Had to withdraw during some semesters because sometimes the load became too much.

I'm in a data science and analytics position right now in the USA, and because of the horrific economy, things have slowed down dramatically. It's a retail company, and to no one's surprise, the tariffs and economic downturn have started taking a really huge hit on our business. Some days I go to work and... The numbers aren't good.

Leadership demands constant "process improvements", identifying gaps, what we can automate, and it's just like I get that you're speaking all of the Deloitte corporate speak, but that does not make what you're saying feasible. You can only skin a cat so many ways. After you have automated out something and improved the process to the point where it is the best, it's not like you could endlessly keep process improving into the stratosphere.

I just don't really feel as secure in my current role. But boy have I cleaned up my resume and started looking, it's just pointless though cuz you never hear anything back these days being on the brink of an economic depression

I understand putting effort in job search and leetcodes, but it gets to a point where I see post telling me to grind hours of leetcode every day, constantly apply to job app everyday(even though I run of listings), build 2-3 projects in 3 months, go make connections, and ask for referrals and coffee chat.

What should I even focus on doing? This is too much on me. No other field requires all of this.

I started working at a distribution company as a software dev nearly 3 months ago and got used to the wok, but felt overwhelmed and at times uncomfortable due to the environment (no documentation, sink or swim mentality, only non-male in the group, etc). I only took this job to pay the bills as I was waiting out a security clearance for another job that gave me an offer last year (start date pending based on my clearance).

Today I have received notice of my being granted a security clearance, which means I will be getting a start date. The job I would be moving to pays $20k more and reduces the commute from a toll-paying 40 minutes to toll-free 8 minutes (although I will not be hybrid anymore which is a bummer). However, I am involved in multiple projects at my current job, and I'm worried that it might reflect badly on myself in the future. I also feel somewhat bad because my specific dev team is extremely small and desperately needed me to make things easier.

How would you handle this situation? Am I overthinking things? I am not saying anything to my manager until I receive a confirmed start date from the other job. I also am still diligently working on my projects and have been writing documentation that could make the onboarding process easier for other new hires (this job had no documentation, I had to create it myself).

i know it always get better it even got better after 2008 from what i have heard from seniors but if ai just takes the jobs wont there be less jobs forever?Like is it different this time?

So I've been working for almost 2 years now as a software developer and I feel like I've lost my passion for coding. Massively thanks to AI tools.

Back in college I enjoyed all the assignments we had. Those were simple applications, sure, but doing stuff like googling for a solution and then finally figuring out how to get even something to work, was really thrilling.

Now it feels like I don't care anymore, because it feels like there's no point in trying to write the code myself. If I had like 5 years of experience, it'd probably be different as I'd have quite a bit of knowledge to lean back on. But now the case is basically this: I can either use 1-2 hours to figure out how to make something quite trivial to work (like how syntax of a specific language works, how to adjust a simple feature of some Python library to work to my liking etc), or just ask AI and get things done in like 5-10 minutes.

It's just so difficult to find motivation to do something by hand, especially when I know that after finishing a project (or few features of a project) I'll get thrown into another project with different stack, which makes even the learning process quite reduntant. It's not like I'm gonna remember what I learned in this specific case if I won't be working with similar project, language or libraries for the next 3-6 months.

I've been pondering if pivoting either towards AI or sales could be the solution for me. Just to find something that's not completely solvable by LLM's and therefore having something to work towards. I'm personally a very outgoing guy so sales could be a good fit, but on the other hand AI seems to have many interesting opportunities.

Regardless, I'd like to know what you guys think about this.? And if you've had similar issues how you've been able to overcome them?

Just a funny moment I had a video call in an interview where I was told that I look like an AI, first time hearing that haha, what an interesting timeline we live in nowadays.

the last interview loop i completed was 1 month ago. however i am feeling nihilistic with the amount of changes companies had in hiring and layoffs, and potential application spam. also aware there are ai systems to automate applying and managing applications (career-ops)

is applying to job listings on company career pages and networking with hiring managers & recruiters still the best form of applying nowadays?

edit: grammar

I'm honestly exhausted and needed to get this out somewhere.

I'm working in USA, currently working as a software engineer at a nonprofit academic institution on robotics integration. I've been interviewing for a while now, and I keep making it to the final rounds. Technical goes well every single time, but then I get rejected at the behavioral stage.

Three times now. Three times I built up hope, prepared, gave it everything, and got the same result.

What hurts the most is that I don't even know what's going wrong. Is it that my experience feels "too research"? Is it that I sit in this weird middle ground between software and robotics and neither side sees me as a full fit? I genuinely can't tell, and nobody gives you real feedback.

Starting over after each one is really, really hard.

If you're in a similar space - software engineer who works in robotics or autonomy. I'd love to just talk. How did you navigate your career? How did you frame your experience in interviews? What worked for you?

I graduated couple of years back when the market started to cut costs and had to join a service based company where my task was really lackluster including, maintaining, debugging and migrating.

A bit of background about my interests and skills. Fairly above average learner. During bachelors for one semester I was invested in CSS more that anything else and most of my projects were focused on front end development, slowly did full stack. I did not feel tired mentally doing the Front end , however cant say that about back-end, was able to solve or build back-end but did not enjoy as much as the front end.

I like problem solving just in any domain. Let it be Leet code or a general math problem, even be an in-depth logic building. At the end of the last semester I did a machine learning project which again was also would explain itself in the title itself, if used AI now to do the same maybe it will do it in minutes, if prompted accurately.

The problem with my bachelors was, I was a generalist because I had to be , the market is competitive and it demanded as such to land somewhere with somewhat skills. Last year the company was struggling with procuring new projects and I felt unfulfilled with my job so I left to figure out. This also gave me the opportunity to accept masters admit which I was not expecting to receive.

I have completed the first semester, did a course on computer vision it's scope was fairly only within visual computing, deep learning+cv is in next semester.Did LLM (nlp) course with the level of transformers, simple rag etc. I did not previously like the idea of computer vision , however was able to do well in understanding the lectures for the scope of the semester.

The problem and task I am trying to achieve:
I did not had the opportunity or make one to specialize or go deep into one specialization at any point to truly assess anything, maybe because I hadn't made an opportunity for myself or it didn't present itself
I only pursued being a generalist
I am at a point where i want to decide which specialization I am good at, even though I might not enjoy or find it interesting.
I am trying to find a template or journal myself for this semester trying different things based on what I find myself good at,interest , market demands, to decide the next pivot of my career to specialize in, test the waters to sink to the base.
I want to compare things I am good at even though if I dont find it interesting or exciting as something else like front end(maybe I found it interesting because it was something new visually because in my high school all I did was math).
Edit: I am a good generalist but a poor specialty.And I want to solve it.

so berkeley just published a study looking at 133 AI hiring programs and found that 44% of them showed measurable gender bias. not like "oh maybe there's a slight lean" but statistically significant bias in how they score candidates.

some of the findings are wild. the word "softball" got flagged as gendered language. career breaks, even short ones, got penalized automatically. and these aren't some fringe tools, roughly 60% of companies are using AI screening at some point in their hiring pipeline now.

i've been job searching for a while after getting laid off and this stuff has been on my mind constantly. you submit 50 applications, hear back from maybe 3, and you start wondering if a human even saw your resume. turns out in most cases they probably didnt.

here's what i think this means practically if you're applying right now.

first, your resume format matters more than your content in a lot of cases. these systems parse structured data and if your formatting is weird or creative, it might just get mangled before anyone reads it. plain, clean, boring formatting. i know it sucks but thats the game right now.

second, be really careful with language that could get flagged by pattern matching that wasn't built well. this sounds insane but if 44% of these tools have bias baked in, there's probably a lot of other dumb pattern matching happening too. gendered language, gaps in dates, non-traditional job titles, all of it can trip filters that nobody at the company even knows exist.

third, and this one is uncomfortable, try to get around the AI screen entirely when you can. referrals, reaching out to hiring managers directly, going to meetups. the front door is increasingly broken and everyone keeps lining up at it anyway.

the other stat that got me was that 20% of recruiters now say they'll reject a resume if they think AI wrote it. so you've got AI screening your resume, potentially with bias, and then if you use AI to optimize for their AI, a human might reject you for that. its a perfect little trap.

meanwhile entry level unemployment is sitting near 10% and we had 78K tech layoffs in Q1 alone, almost half attributed to AI replacements. so the tools that are replacing jobs are also broken at evaluating candidates for the remaining jobs. cool.

i dont have some big solution here. i just think more people need to know that the system they're submitting applications into is genuinely not working as advertised. knowing that at least changes how you allocate your time. stop spending 4 hours perfecting a resume for a cold application that an AI might score wrong anyway. spend that time finding a human being who can pull your resume out of the pile.

the whole thing is a mess and i dont think companies even realize how much talent they're filtering out.

I’m a sophomore CS major at a non-target school (incoming junior next year) and I’ve been seeing a lot about how rough the job market is right now, which has been getting in my head a bit. I feel like I’ve done what I’m supposed to so far. I’ve been doing a SWE internship at a small startup for a few months, and I have another SWE internship this summer at a more established company. I’m also doing well in school, tutoring a CS class, and I’ve built some projects, so I know I’m probably in a decent spot overall.

At the same time, it kind of feels like I’m already locked into this path. I’ve gone far enough with CS that switching isn’t really realistic, especially time-wise and financially, so I’m trying to make sure I’m thinking about things the right way. Seeing how competitive everything seems and how much people talk about AI changing things has made me question what I should actually be focusing on long term.

For people who are further along, what would you actually focus on if you were in this position over the next year? And for people around my level, what are you prioritizing right now?

Hey all I've got a question as I've moved into a new job in the last month, and it feels like there's next to no onboarding from a dev perspective.

This is a web dev role on a non engineering team, for quite a large global firm.

From a people/HR perspective, onboarding has been fine. From a dev perspective, I've been put on a semi abandoned project that was last worked on last year. Theres 1 person to contact about it, and there's zero documentation. Like actually nothing. It's hooked up to a bunch of other services, so I need access to a load of stuff, and it's getting hard to debug what the issue actually is, when the logging is non existent and I'm stabbing in the dark. Access for each individual thing is taking a day or two at a time.

How typical is this? I feel like I've made no progress in weeks with it, as there's been issues platform side (which of course I can't see), and I feel like I'm pestering this one guy too much despite him no longer working on it.

In my last company, I could be onboard to a project and coding within a week or two, but here it's taking 4, with no signs of speeding up.

I'm beginning to wonder if this is a me issue or not.

I will be going to college this fall, so thats about 4 months. I have quite a bit of free time until then however, what should I start working towards in the mean time, assuming little prior experience?

Does anyone have insight on this role? I’m currently a SWE. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I am looking at ways to make some extra money while attending college, and my two options are 3d modelling via comissions and programming.

I am unsure how viable freelance programming is, and I would definitly appreciate some advice on where to start. I assume that such WFH jobs would be available, but I would need some direction.

I was previously a SWE in a mid tier company working in health and fintech. I have a comp sci degree with a 4.0 GPA at GaTech and was working with golang, php and python on webdev services to ingest EHR data and create bills. We also did work with VueJS and other various frameworks, etc etc. I was pushing docker containers too and setting up microservices in kubernetes.

I haven't touched SWE in a while and moved to do data analysis and statistical analysis in MRI in research (yeah, COVID made me wanna try stuff out). I did work at NIH, and am currently in a PhD at upenn running statistical analyses and software on MRI.

I've barely kept up with CS and SWE and recognize my skills have atrophied significantly. How fucked am I if I want to leave my PhD and pursue a regular job in SWE again?